True first edition, not to be confused with a later Violette Editions publication on Bowery. Leigh Bowery (1959-1994) was, among other things, a performance artist, club owner and model to Lucian Freud. An all-around art-fashion agent provocateur, he cast an enormous shadow over New York and London nightclub culture of the 80s and 90s. He was the subject of the 2002 documentary The Legend of Leigh Bowery by Charles Atlas as well as a play, Taboo, by Boy George, which ran on Broadway and was based on the notorious club he ran in London in the mid-'80s. Writing in 2004, Bob Nickas said, "Bowery's uncanny ability to visually disorient the senses remains unmatched, his reinvention of costume as sculpture ground-breaking. From the tripped-out tribalism of Forcefield and the psychedelic erotics of Christian Holstad to the work of designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Alexander McQueen, his vocabulary, punctuated by about a million sequins, resonates to this day."
This definitive book on Bowery's work is a must for anyone with an interest in the outer reaches of gender subversiveness in fashion, and performance circa 80s-early 90s.